EU regulators intensify scrutiny of TikTok’s protections for younger users
TikTok is facing fresh pressure in Europe after the European Commission said the platform had not adequately protected children’s privacy rights. The preliminary findings center on how easily minors’ accounts could be exposed to wider audiences, a setup regulators said can leave children vulnerable to cyberbullying, unwanted contact, and predatory behavior.
The case adds to a broader push by Brussels to enforce its digital rulebook against major technology companies. In this instance, the Commission said TikTok allowed adults to view the accounts of minors under conditions that should have been more tightly restricted by default. Officials argued that the issue is not simply whether privacy settings exist, but whether those settings work in practice to protect younger users.
What the Commission says TikTok did wrong
According to the Commission, children between 13 and 15 could easily switch their accounts from private to public. Regulators also said that even the private accounts of some older minors, specifically those aged 16 to 17, could be seen by anyone on the internet. In the Commission’s view, that undermines the expectation that minors receive heightened safeguards online.
Thomas Regnier, a Commission spokesperson, framed the problem in blunt terms. If the steps required by the European Union’s Digital Services Act are not effectively implemented, he said, minors can be exposed to grooming, cyberbullying, and other forms of harm. The Commission’s message is that child-safety defaults are not a cosmetic compliance box. They must reduce risk in a meaningful way.
The Commission also pointed to the possibility that weak defaults could expose children’s content to strangers. That concern goes beyond data privacy in the narrow sense. It touches account discoverability, visibility, and the ease with which adults can interact with or observe younger users’ activity.
A procedural step with potentially serious consequences
The findings do not yet amount to a final penalty. TikTok now has an opportunity to respond and defend its practices. That response matters, because the current stage is part of a formal enforcement process under the Digital Services Act, one of the European Union’s flagship laws for governing online platforms.
If the Commission is not satisfied with TikTok’s reply, it could move to a non-compliance decision. That, in turn, could lead to a fine of up to 6% of the company’s total annual revenue. For a platform of TikTok’s scale, that is not a symbolic threat. It is a penalty framework designed to make large platforms treat compliance as a core operational issue rather than an afterthought.
The case also illustrates how the DSA is being used in practice. The law is often described in broad terms, but enforcement depends on concrete judgments about product design, defaults, and user flows. In TikTok’s case, the Commission is effectively arguing that child protection must be built into the platform’s architecture and not left primarily to user choice.
TikTok says it will engage with regulators
TikTok said it would review the findings and continue to engage constructively with the Commission. The company also said protecting minors online is a goal it shares and pointed to what it described as a strong record of continuous improvement.
That response suggests TikTok is positioning itself as cooperative rather than confrontational. But the regulatory pressure is unlikely to ease simply because the company says it supports the same broad objective. European regulators have increasingly focused on whether platform systems deliver measurable safety outcomes, especially for children, rather than whether companies can point to policy statements or incremental product changes.
The underlying question is whether TikTok’s current setup gives minors meaningful protection by default. On that point, the Commission’s preliminary view is clear: it does not.
Part of a larger EU campaign against platform risk
The investigation arrives amid a wider pattern of European action against large technology firms. Brussels has spent years building a reputation as the most aggressive major regulator of the digital economy, targeting companies including Meta and Apple as well as ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company.
TikTok is already under pressure on another front. In February, the European Union found that the platform had breached another part of its digital rulebook through an “addictive design” tied to features such as autoplay and infinite scrolling. Regulators said those features could harm users’ physical and mental health, with minors seen as particularly vulnerable.
Viewed together, the two cases show that the Commission is examining TikTok not only for what users can see or share, but for how the product is structured to shape behavior and risk. Privacy settings, content visibility, autoplay, and endless feeds are all being treated as parts of the same larger policy problem: whether platforms are engineered in ways that intensify harm for young users.
Why the issue matters beyond TikTok
The Commission estimates that most of TikTok’s 170 million users in the European Union are children. It also says that 7% of children aged 12 to 15 spend four to five hours daily on the app. Those figures help explain why regulators see design and privacy defaults as a systemic issue rather than a niche compliance dispute.
At that scale, even small gaps in account protections can affect millions of minors. The European approach reflects a growing policy view that platforms with large youth audiences should be designed around safety from the start. Under that logic, a product cannot rely on younger users to navigate complicated settings or to understand the consequences of making an account public.
The TikTok case will likely be watched closely across the industry because it may signal how far European regulators are willing to go in interpreting the DSA’s obligations toward minors. If the Commission ultimately concludes that current defaults are insufficient, other platforms with youth-heavy audiences may face pressure to revisit their own account visibility, privacy, and recommendation systems.
For now, TikTok remains in the response phase. But the direction of travel is difficult to miss. Europe is making clear that child safety on major platforms will be judged not by promises alone, but by product decisions that can withstand regulatory scrutiny.
This article is based on reporting by Fast Company. Read the original article.
Originally published on fastcompany.com
